New Multi-GPU Technology With No Strings Attached

Vigile writes "Multi-GPU technology from both NVIDIA and ATI has long been dependent on many factors including specific motherboard chipsets and forcing gamers to buy similar GPUs within a single generation. A new company called Lucid Logix is showing off a product that could potentially allow vastly different GPUs to work in tandem while still promising near-linear scaling on up to four chips. The HYDRA Engine is dedicated silicon that dissects DirectX and OpenGL calls and modifies them directly to be distributed among the available graphics processors. That means the aging GeForce 6800 GT card in your closet might be useful once again and the future of one motherboard supporting both AMD and NVIDIA multi-GPU configurations could be very near."

Comments

Interesting

[dreamchaser]

I gave TFA a quick perusal and it looks like some sort of profiling is done. I was about to ask about how it handled load balancing when using GPU's of disparate power, but perhaps that has something to do with it. It may even run some type of micro-benchmarks to determine which card has more power and then distribute the load accordingly.

I'll reserve judgement until I see reviews of it really working. From TFA it looks like it has some interesting potential capabilities, especially for multi-monitor use.

Re:Interesting

[x2A]

"It seems to be using feedback from the rendering itself"

Yep it does look like it's worked out dynamically; the article states that you can start watching a movie on another monitor while scene rendering on another, and it will compensate by sending fewer tasks to the busy card. Simplest way I'd assume to do this would be to keep feeding tasks into each cards pipeline until the scene is rendered. If one completes tasks quicker than the other, it will get more tasks fed in. I guess you'd either need to load the textures into all cards, or the rendering of sections of the scene could have to be decided in part by which card as textures it needs already in its texture memory.

I guess we're not gonna know a huge amount as these are areas they're understandably keeping close to their chests.

No

[x2A]

ATI were bought out by AMD, so future ATI GPUs will be released by AMD.

Re:Latency.

[Mprx]

I agree this is a common problem in modern games; see http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1942/programming_responsiveness.php

Don't confuse control latency with reaction time. Reaction time will be at least 150ms for even the best players, but humans can notice time delays much smaller than best reaction time. A good rhythm game player can hit frame exact timing at 60fps -- a 17ms time window. With low enough latency the game character feels like a part of your own body, rather than something you are indirectly influencing.

The same thing applies to GUIs, and only a very short delay will destroy that feeling of transparency of action. I never actually used BeOS myself, but I read that it was designed with low interface latency as a priority, which was why it got such good reviews for user experience.

Re:Latency.

[Colonel Korn]

Latency will be a problem. All that extra message passing and emulation layers.

Already, most Windows 3d games lead me feeling a little disconnected compared to DOS games.
The sound effects and graphics always lag behind the input a little.

Try playing doom in DOS with a soundblaster, then try a modern windows game. With doom you hear and see the gun go off when you hit the fire button. In a modern 3d game, you don't.

I've experienced the same thing over a number of different computers.

Most monitors have about a 30-50 ms input lag, meaning the image is always a frame or two behind in most modern games. You can get a 0-5 ms input lag monitor, though. The DS-263n is a good example. I felt like everything was lagged ever since I switched to LCDs, but once I picked up the 263, that feeling is gone. The feeling of sound lagging input could be a different issue or it could be psychological.

Re:My god...

[Bureaucromancer]

Presumably he's North American, we (among a few other places) use 120v lines, 240 is reserved for special high power circuits, generally only used for dryers, stoves and refrigerators (and only some of the first two).